Welsh Journals

EARLY WELSH SAGA-POETRY: A STUDY AND EDITION OF THE ENGLYNION. By Jenny Rowland. D. S. Brewer, Cambridge, 1990. Pp. x, 688. £ 75.00. This book is a major work of scholarship, and the author is heartily to be congratulated on bringing it to fruition. It has its origin in a University of Wales Ph.D. thesis submitted from the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 1983. The thesis was supervised by Emeritus Professor J. E. Caerwyn Williams, to whom Dr. Rowland pays a warm tribute in a foreword. The book in fact replicates the thesis quite closely, apart from some necessary updating, but this is not, as might be thought, a criticism of the book but rather an indication that the thesis as presented was an extraordinarily thorough, well-organized and mature piece of work. In the book Dr. Rowland discusses and edits the saga-poems (so called because they tell a story) in the three-line englyn metres, preserved chiefly in the Red Book of Hergest (c. 1400) but generally dated to the ninth and tenth centuries. The great pioneer in this field was Sir Ifor Williams with his Rhys Lecture of 1932 and his edition, Canu Llywarch Hen, of 1935. It is a remarkable tribute to Sir Ifor's work that Dr. Rowland is able decisively to confirm the main outlines of his treatment, although not without considerable modification and refinement. She has also made use, when it seemed to her appropriate, of the later, partial, editions of Professor P. K. Ford (1974) and Mr. Eurys Rolant (1984). The book is divided into two parts. In the first, Dr. Rowland discusses the various cycles into which the saga-poetry is resolved, together with some more general topics. The Llywarch Hen cycle is first dealt with and the problems implicit in using the surviving genealogies are briefly discussed; Dr. Rowland, incidentally, challenges Emeritus Professor A. O. H. Jarman's generally received theory that the englynion of this cycle present a modification of the heroic ideal portrayed in its pristine purity in the Gododdin. Second come the Urien Rheged poems which Dr. Rowland sees as constituting a distinct cycle of their own, although a less unified cycle than that of Llywarch Hen: in this she disagrees from Sir Ifor and is almost certainly right; the fascinating question of whether or not some of these poems may actually have originated in North Britain is touched upon but not fully discussed. The discussion of the Canu Heledd cycle, possibly the most important part of the book, is again divided into two, 'Historical Background' and 'Poems'; in the one the cycle's worth as historical evidence is incisively queried-a standpoint which has already begun to be influential, as a glance at, for example, Dr. Steven Bassett's symposium, The Origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms (1989), will demonstrate-whereas in the other the possible mythological significance of the narrator is pointed out for the first time. The fourth cycle, if it can be so called, is 'Claf Abercuawg' (the leper of Abercuawg), but the occasion is taken to discuss the penitential genre in general, drawing on a wide range of comparative material. Chapter 5 discusses miscellaneous saga poems, mostly from the Black Book of Carmarthen (c. 1250), but including also the precious three- stanza saga sequence from the Cambridge University Library Manuscript Ff. 4. 42 (early ninth century); the question of whether the poems were ever accompanied by